Noah R

Popular Science has a wonderful feature about colored bubbles. The inventor, Tim Kehoe, spent 11 years figuring out a way to make bubbles with color that disappeared after the pop.

And then the bubbles broke on the kids, on the parents, on cars, on Haddleton's prized German Shepherds. It looked like there had been a paint fight. Kehoe had told the parents that the color would wash out, but it didn't matter. Not when their children were covered head to toe in blue and pink splotches, when the color was getting into their shoes and hair and soaking into the concrete. In the faces of the horrified mothers, Kehoe immediately grasped the lesson. "You can't go to market with something that leaves that much color, even if it is washable," he says. "It freaks people out."

Kehore partnered with a chemist and hundreds of experiments later, built a "dye molecule from an unstable base structure called a lactone ring..." Okay, but what you really need to know is that Zubbles should be available in stores come February. And Kehoe is working on some new potential uses for his disappearing colors: vanishing hair dye, soap, toothpaste, even temporary wall paints.